Can I let you in on a guilty little secret? The Australian Defence Force is too small. It must grow, which will cost money, political will and a sea change in thinking. That change will not come from within Defence but is a matter of political leadership.

There are 61,468 uniformed personnel in the permanent ADF, and they work with 16,695 civilian public servants in the defence organisation. That’s 78,063 in a population of 26,068,792—a rounding error in statistical terms. Reservists add another 21,390, the equivalent of about 5,000 full-time personnel. Most have other jobs and duties, many of which are essential during times of national need (think rural firefighting or medical personnel).

But the range of things this small number of Australians has been doing domestically, regionally and globally in the past three years has been extraordinary: support to the 2019–20 bushfire crisis, mask production, quarantine hotel management, house-to-house Covid checks, aged care home cleaning, Tongan volcano recovery work, Covid vaccination assistance with Australian colleagues in the South Pacific and a return to the Solomons to help with security and stability there. Prime Minister Scott Morrison appointed Lieutenant General John Frewen to turn around a flailing vaccination rollout. Most recently, ADF men and women have been deployed to help with the flood crisis in New South Wales and Queensland. I’ll have missed a few things here; it’s just the highlights that have been in the public eye.

And then there’s the logistical and materiel assistance Australia is part of with our US and NATO partners in the heat of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

That’s all in addition to Defence’s ‘day job’: growing Australia’s military power with the rising budget successive governments have entrusted it with since 2014, running the business enterprise that acquires and operates complex systems and weapons, and doing all the training and exercising that being able to use lethal force in our more dangerous world requires. It’s also been doing demanding and challenging daily work with our regional security partners to demonstrate presence, power and resolve in the face of an increasingly belligerent and overconfident People’s Liberation Army directed by Xi Jinping. (The Chinese guided missile destroyer that used an offensive military laser against a Royal Australian Air Force patrol aircraft off our coast last month is just the most recent, closest, graphic demonstration of this new normal.)

The problem is obvious. The ADF is too small to meet these rolling, simultaneous and growing demands on its skilled people and on the expensive, complex machines and systems that it buys and operates while doing what it must to succeed in war. It’s being corroded and torn apart by overuse of small groups of valuable skilled people, many for tasks their highly developed military abilities aren’t really relevant to.

Defence leaders are making this even more acute by the structural position they take to doing anything other than preparing for and conducting military operations involving lethal force—war. Defence’s mantra for decades has been that ‘Defence structures for war and adapts for peace’. National and regional ‘assistance’ is to be provided with the people and machines acquired for the ‘core task’ of warfighting. To do anything differently, the mantra goes, is to distract the military from its core mission and dilute the force.

That’s a compelling logic, except that it pretends the military can be an island to itself, funded by the Australian people and elegantly preparing for or doing the single most critical thing it is needed for—deterring or prevailing in war—while politely refusing other demands that get in the way. Even amid the horrific physical demonstration by Putin that wars are not historical anachronisms, our military simply cannot just structure for war and adapt to do anything else that a government and our nation requires.

That’s because rolling national and regional disasters and events—pandemics, fires, floods and regional instability—are growing in intensity and frequency. And when a crisis strikes, any Australian prime minister (and more and more often multiple premiers, chief ministers and governments in our region) see a role for the ADF—regardless of Defence’s desires to protect its ‘preparedness and readiness’ for core military operations. The government made clear in its 2020 defence strategic update that it sees these tasks as core Defence business. Whatever internal pressures and preferences there may be inside the Russell Hill complex, Defence doesn’t say ‘no’ when the prime minister asks.

Defence has caught itself in a dangerous spiral of denying that its structure, size, equipment and training are insufficient to meet its growing military and non-military tasks while being unable to convince political leaders it can’t do what the nation requires—whether that’s a public health emergency, bushfire, flood or regional disaster.

Defence would prefer that ‘somebody else’ do these things. And that’s absolutely right—Australia needs to invest in greater resilience in multiple parts of government and private sector operations to deal with the disrupted future we know is already here.

But the empirical fact is that even if other agencies, organisations and people step up in crises, there’s still a growing gap the military will need to plug. Because the essential value that ‘sending in the ADF’ brings to any prime minister—and the Australian public—is that it is a disciplined and trained body of men and women who can be ordered to do things rapidly and relied upon to do new tasks intelligently and well. Turning up fast and getting to work effectively has a value all of its own when it comes to reassurance, resilience and recovery. There are few other levers and tools available to our national leaders that have these attributes.

A new ‘civil disaster assistance organisation’ would need to build a separate support system and enterprise—including training, contracting, sustainment, facilities and logistics arrangements—instead of just blistering onto Defence’s larger business enterprise. That would be expensive, duplicative and slow, and the result would not be an immediately deployable, disciplined group of people able to be ordered to do what is required like the ADF.

So, the answer is a sea change in assumptions about what Defence is resourced, scaled and structured to do—and what it buys and trains to operate. Radical shifts in mindset come from an openness to admit that key assumptions behind what you’re doing have changed. Failure comes from doing the same thing when the environment you’re operating in has changed.

Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz is an example of someone who has realised this in a big way over a matter of days, not years. He announced radical changes to decades-long policy and budgeting directions for Germany’s military days after Putin began his war in Ukraine. Scholz understood that ‘we are living in a new era, and the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before’. We should be encouraged by his and others’ willingness to change when the times demand it.

The time is right for an Australian political leader—the prime minister or defence minister—to make the case to give Defence new funding, to be used only to grow a new part of its organisation with a core mission of helping Australia cope with the increasing number of domestic and regional crises our disrupted future environment has in store for us.

That will mean recruiting people for this new mission, acquiring different (cheaper, less complex, commercial-standard) equipment like helicopters and even ships (along the lines of the Pacific support vessel already planned), all while recognising the sense of purpose that people recruited for these essential tasks will feel.

The result will be a defence force that can provide options for assistance in times of national and regional need to this and future governments, without corroding the increasingly urgent efforts to have a more powerful military able to both deter others from war and, with our partner and allies, to prevail in war should deterrence fail.

I doubt there would be anything but celebration and relief from the broad Australian public if funding for a new ‘national and regional assistance command’ is provided in the next budget. Once it starts to operate, those officials and military personnel who’ve defended the now broken ‘structure for war, adapt for peace’ mantra might be thankful. Because they’ll be able to do what the nation demands without being torn in two, or failing, while doing so.

The Australian Defence Force has long had an important role in providing humanitarian assistance to Pacific island countries. The force has extraordinary capabilities—people, expertise, training and equipment—in delivering assistance quickly and efficiently. The ADF is one of our most important agencies in helping our Pacific islands partners develop capabilities to address a range of security challenges.

My new report for ASPI, Next step in the step-up, released today, looks at ways in which the ADF can build health security in the Pacific as part of a new phase in Australia’s Pacific step-up.

The community health needs of Pacific island countries will grow significantly in coming years as they endure ever more natural disasters. Climate change is likely to cause ongoing stresses to island health systems through extreme weather events, increased diseases, reduced water quality, heatwaves and population displacement. Calls for assistance from Australian civil and military organisations will almost certainly grow ever louder.

Many countries rely on the unique capabilities and expertise of militaries to provide humanitarian assistance. With assets such as ships, planes and trucks and expert personnel, military organisations are often best placed to deliver food, logistic support, engineering assistance and emergency medical services, especially in times of crisis.

The provision of medical assistance to communities in need is seen as a particularly important way of ‘winning hearts and minds’. So-called medical diplomacy can involve short-term relief, such as responding to disasters, or long-term measures to build capabilities.

The US military is often at the forefront of assistance efforts as an integral part of US humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions.

The United States, and now China, are also increasingly using naval hospital ships to deliver military health assistance. These gleaming white ships certainly capture the imagination. Indeed, who wouldn’t be impressed with the idea of a floating hospital, fully staffed and with access to all the latest technology, anchored off a tropical island, delivering the medical services to (hopefully, grateful) locals?

But using militaries to deliver health services is also subject to a lot of criticism. ‘Drive-by medicine’ by military health professionals on brief visits can do more harm than good, including by undercutting and discrediting local health providers and providing treatments that can’t be sustained. Importantly, they rarely build local capabilities or relationships.

For these reasons, the ADF is rightly cautious about providing health assistance. ADF personnel regularly provide logistics and engineering assistance following natural disasters, including in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations in countries such as Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, the Philippines and Vanuatu. But since 2007 the ADF hasn’t provided health assistance as part of those operations.

This has led to the underutilisation of Australia’s military health capabilities in the Pacific. Important opportunities to reinforce regional partnerships aren’t being pursued.

The ADF is well placed to support the rollout of Covid-19 immunisation programs through transport and logistical support to Pacific island countries, as part of delivering on the vaccination initiative announced at the recent Quad leaders’ meeting. We’ve seen that in recent weeks in PNG.

But the ADF can also play an important long-term role in building health capabilities, while also avoiding the problems traditionally associated with military health assistance. The government should consider a new role for the ADF in the Pacific through developing mutually beneficial enduring military health partnerships.

This would involve the rotation of ADF health professionals through partner hospitals where they would have the opportunity to gain unique frontline experience from local experts, while also sharing their own knowledge and skills with local clinicians. The aim would be to build experience and training for both sides as part of an enduring institutional relationship.

Each one-month rotation would comprise ADF clinicians of different specialties, so, although the ADF presence would endure, no clinical specialty would always be present. ADF clinicians wouldn’t bring equipment or consumables to avoid interfering in the hospitals’ own supply chains.

For the ADF, the costs of rotating deployments of relatively small numbers of permanent and reserve personnel could be managed as part of overall training costs.

This would not be traditional humanitarian assistance, but would be a true partnership, filling a major gap in the ADF’s training needs while also delivering lasting benefits to our Pacific neighbours.

It would also be a big benefit to Australia. Our effective withdrawal of ADF health assets from humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations since 2007 has left the force’s clinical staff with few overseas operational roles. The competencies required for field-deployed health care, for example, in treating tropical diseases and in lifesaving ‘damage control’ surgery, can’t easily be acquired in the Australian civilian system. That leaves an experience gap.

As a result, many ADF clinicians lack experience and mentorship from working in small, remote hospitals in the context of a high prevalence of trauma and infectious disease. Yet those are exactly what ADF field hospitals must deal with in a military contingency. In contrast, many medical colleagues in the Pacific islands are experts in those areas. This means that ADF clinicians may miss important training opportunities necessary to properly fulfil their military roles.

It’s also a question of recruitment and retention. Many health professionals join the ADF, as either permanent or reserve personnel, with a view to helping those in need in our region. Current policies effectively deny them the opportunity to serve in the region as ADF members.

There are important opportunities here. An enhanced role for the ADF in regional health security, properly structured, might ultimately come to be seen alongside the Pacific patrol boat program as a successful example of mutually beneficial partnerships between the ADF and our Pacific neighbours.

A month on from my earlier post on bringing the Australian Defence Force into the global warming fight, a lot has changed. Responding to the national bushfire catastrophe, the government has deployed more than 6,000 ADF personnel together with armoured vehicles, amphibious ships and transport aircraft. Even so, this is a stopgap measure. There remain the customary arguments opposing such ADF involvement, including that the ADF is solely a warfighting force and there’s no money.

Such issues hinge on a compelling strategic narrative. Robert Glasser is right in pointing out that we’re entering a new national security era in Australia. The problem is that global warming is wholly novel. There is no historical analogy to fall back on to give us cognitive assistance. However, we do know what it’s not: it is not a transnational criminal threat and neither is it a biohazard that governments everywhere cooperate on to defeat. It is, though, an almost totally externally generated threat and effectively forever.

The natural environment will now always be in a state of constant change. There will be no ‘new normal’. It’s not sufficient to address the problem by outsourcing through a regularly tendered contract. Instead, it needs an organisation that can constantly learn, that is flexible and adaptable, that is sovereign, that is always available and that accepts a real risk of death and injury. That sounds a lot like the ADF.

In my earlier post I proposed an additional 5,000 ADF personnel assigned to limiting the impact of global-warming-related events such as floods, megafires, cyclones and severe storms. Today’s ADF is regularly diverted from preparing for warfighting by the steadily rising demands for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR; in the military, you know things are serious when there’s an acronym for it).

The ADF is now frequently involved in offshore HADR. For example, 1,000 ADF personnel were sent to Fiji after Cyclone Winston. A fortnight ago, at the height of our bushfire crisis, two cyclones passed through the Fijian islands. They were smaller than Winston’s category 5, but indicate that the New Zealand Defence Force’s fears in 2017 of multiple disasters happening simultaneously are real. If the ADF needed to respond now to a major offshore disaster, it would stretch resources thin.

The ADF has 2,000 personnel deployed, most in the greater Middle East and on border patrol. To keep these deployments going, the rule of three applies. There are 2,000 getting ready to go and 2,000 just back. So 6,000 are actually committed. With 6,000+ on bushfire duties (including around 2,500 reservists), that’s over 12,000 ADF personnel on operations. They are not preparing for their possible warfighting tasks; their skills are indeed dissipating.

An extra 5,000 personnel would allow the warfighting part of the ADF to get on and become good at what it needs to. Crucially, the extra 5,000 would professionalise HADR, including participating on the frequent international HADR exercises—which again don’t build warfighting skills.

Today, we have the bizarre situation where the (normally) unpaid volunteers at the bushfire front line are being supported by the salaried professionals of the ADF. It should be the other way around. Australia’s disaster response needs to be from professionals first and mainly, complemented by unpaid volunteers as appropriate.

Professionalisation would also mean having the right equipment. It’s not just the apocryphal stories of crowd funding by the Rural Fire Service to get protective breathing equipment. The National Aerial Firefighting Centre is a fine coordination hub, but it can only coordinate what it has. Getting firefighting aircraft quickly, when Australia really wants them, is harder than it sounds. A professional ADF response to global-warming-related disasters would come with proper equipment and be properly trained.

However, all of that would require funding. A quick division of the defence budget by the 100,000 or so personnel it supports, including full-time staff, reservists, contractors and consultants, suggests 5,000 full-time-equivalent positions might cost, say, $2 billion annually, or around 5% of the defence budget. By comparison, the 12 new submarines will cost about $80 billion to buy, or some 40 years of global warming disaster-related relief. If Australia can afford the submarines, Australia can afford a professional HADR group within defence. It’s just a matter of priorities.

Today, there is disappointment at the limited resources available to defend towns from extensive damage. Having insufficient resources constrains what can be done and inevitably some lose out. Global warming may be an external threat Australia can’t solve, but lack of resources is an issue we could. More resources equal better outcomes; much more resources, much better outcomes.

Let’s imagine all this happens. When fires, floods, cyclones or severe storms loom there will now be adequate resources at hand to deal with the impacts. A well-equipped, professional force will have the capacity to be significantly more ambitious in trying to limit damage. Right now, we’re trying to figure out what can be done with the limited resources available. Maybe the right question is, if we had enough resources what could be done?

As global warming deepens, we need to do better. Keeping the ADF in the fight is one part of the solution.

International aid for the Philippines after last November’s devastating typhoon has had some security consequences. Changes have occurred in the Philippines’ relations with the United States, with Japan, with China, with Hong Kong and with Taiwan. Typhoon Haiyan (Typhoon Yolanda to the Filipinos) killed perhaps more than 6000 people and made about 4.4 million homeless.

Possibly the most significant effect over aid has involved the United States. The disaster overwhelmed the Philippines’ relief and military services. The first substantial aid came from the United States. Once the colonial power in the Philippines, the US was quick and generous. It sent marines from Okinawa. Helicopters, water plants and other equipment were made available from the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier.

Read more